Lena's POV
The Stormridge packhouse was visible from a distance.
I had expected something imposing. I had not expected something that managed to be both grand and cold in the same breath, the way high mountains are cold. It rose from the surrounding territory with the permanence of something that had not been built so much as simply always been there, all dark stone and high windows and the particular scale of a structure designed to house power and to make that housing unmistakable.
My mother, beside me in the vehicle, looked at it through the window without speaking.
Tara, on my other side, was doing her cataloguing expression again.
I watched the packhouse grow larger as we came through the gates and I made myself look at it with clear eyes rather than with the intimidation it was
